By FHH Law, CommLawBlog, January 15, 2014
| Cell phones on airplanes? Everybody seems to have an opinion about | the FCC's proposal (about which we reported last month) - and it | seems to be the same opinion across the board. | | Now the Commission's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) has made | it into the Federal Register, so we all have a deadline for making | our feelings known to the Commission. To be sure, the fact that no | deadline has heretofore been established hasn't stopped folks from | expressing their views: within the first month following release of | the NPRM more than 400 comments had been filed. No, we didn't read | them all, but a spot check indicates that approximately all of them | oppose giving a governmental green light to cell phone use in the | air. | | On the other hand, none of the comments we saw takes on the main | issue the FCC has authority to decide: whether cell phones in the | air will cause interference to cell service on the ground. If the | answer is no, the FCC will have little choice but to drop its ban | and let the airlines decide what kind of cabin environment they | want in the air.
Continued:
Neal McLain